in a hot house, for she sat the whole
day long wrapped up in her costly fur jacket and looked down dreamily
into the street.

She had no children; her husband, the philosopher, studied, and prayed,
and studied again from early morning until late at night; his mistress
was _the Veiled Beauty_, as the Talmudists call the Kabbalah. She paid
no attention to her house, for she was rich and everything went of its
own accord, just like a clock, which has only to be wound up once a week;
nobody came to see her, and she never went out of the house; she sat and
dreamed and brooded and--yawned.

* * * * *

One day when a terrible storm of thunder and lightning had spent all its
fury over the town, and all windows had been opened in order to let the
Messiah in, the Jewish Venus was sitting as usual in her comfortable easy
chair, shivering in spite of her fur jacket, and was thinking, when
suddenly she fixed her glowing eyes on the man who was sitting before the
Talmud, swaying his body backwards and forwards, and said suddenly:

"Just tell me, when will Messias, the Son of David, come?"

"He will come," the philosopher replied, "when all the Jews have become
either altogether virtuous or altogether vicious, says the Talmud."

"Do you believe that all the Jews will ever become virtuous," the Venus
continued.

"How am I to believe that!"

"So Messias will come, when all the Jews have become vicious?"

The philosopher shrugged his shoulders and lost himself again in the
labyrinth of the Talmud, out of which, so it is said, only one man
returned unscathed, and the beautiful woman at the window again looked
dreamily out onto the heavy rain, while her white fingers played
unconsciously with the dark fur of her splendid jacket.

* * * * *

One day the Jewish philosopher had gone to a neighboring town, where an
important question of ritual was to be decided. Thanks to his learning,
the question was settled sooner than he had expected, and instead of
returning the next morning, as he had intended, he came back the same
evening with a friend, who was no less learned than himself. He got out
of the carriage at his friend's house, and went home on foot, and was
not a little surprised when he saw his windows brilliantly illuminated,
and found an officer's servant comfortably smoking his pipe in front of
his house.

"What are you doing here?" he asked in a friendly manne